Music reviews in plain English.

Famy: We Fam Econo

This is the debut album from Famy, out on 8th September and it’s the sound of a band trying hard to elevate their average music to the heights of cultdom.

In sound it’s somewhere between the tribal indie of Wu Lyf and the more cerebral indie pop of Cave Painting; the former released an excellent album Votive Life almost exactly two years ago 2012, then cancelled a tour and disappeared. Wu Lyf were from Manchester and all mysterious, so much so that after not releasing much information to the press, very few people bought their CD and they split.

Famy’s album was recorded in a church in Wales over 10 days, and pre-orders of We Fam Econo will be accompanied by a fanzine, which features visual documentation of the album’s creation.

It’s OK. It’s so like Cave Painting we wondered if there’s a link – pleasant indie pop with a nice atmosphere, with hints of the Wu Lyf tribal rhythms. It’s all nice enough but it’s slightly too bland to be really good, and they’re trying slightly too hard to make it sound important.

Having said that: we’d quite like to see them live and we often find that more subtle albums grow once we’ve stopped listening to them critically, so you never know. On the plus side, one man’s bland is another’s easy-to-listen-to. The songs are nicely textured and there are lots of harmonies. If only Cave Painting / Wu Lyf hadn’t gone before.